It's The End of the Year as We List It

You can't open a newspaper, turn on a TV channel or read a website without stumbling across someone categorising the year in some aspect or other. Order must prevail. Awards must be handed out. Opinions must be opined. So I thought I should join in. Here's two Top 5 lists that will mean very little to anyone else but me. Both are in chronological order.

Top 5 Meals of 2007
1. St John in February. Langoustines and Mayonnaise, a whole loaf of foie gras, suckling pig for 12, Eccles Cakes and Lancashire Cheese and 24 fine German Rieslings. Obscene and worth every penny. I'd do it again tomorrow. In fact, we should do it again tomorrow.

2. A Parisian market picnic on the sleeper train to Milan. Saumur-Champigny from a beaker washed down an oozing St Marcellin, wafer-thin speck, sour, chewy baguette and - most importantly - Jen.

3. Cambol Zero, Rivoli outside of Turin. Only one star but three times the experience we had in L'Astrance in Paris. Proof that there is more to a great restuarant than great food. Give me humour, humility, enthusiasm and warmth over cold-blooded perfection anyday.

4. The River Cafe in August with Jen, Jen and Greg. One of this year's few summery days and the perfect place to skive off an afternoon at work. I remember multi-coloured baby beets with horseradish, silky pasta parcels, spanking-fresh fish and a wholly unneccessary bottle of Moscato d'Asti in the sunshine longer after we should have gone home.

5. Ben's Birthday in November. Ben tells me his abiding memory is twirling bread dough into grissini whilst covered in flour and half-cut on Champagne at 11 o'clock in the morning. How weekend lunches should be.

Top 5 Dishes of 2007

1. The foie gras and mushroom cake at L'Astrance with its 'roasted lemon' and pool of hazelnut oil. A perfect dish of just four ingredients. The sweet-sharp lemon was the ideal foil for the foie gras whilst the hazelnut turned the raw white mushrooms into fungi heaven. I never said Pascal Bardot couldn't cook.

2. A foie gras risotto with fried artichokes at Cambol Zero. Indecently rich.

3. A humble Panzanella made from ripe tomatoes and stale sourdough baguette in Uzes.

4. Another Uzes afternoon: leftover ratatouille, fried sardines and ice-cold Provence rose. Then a nap.

5. Pheasant and Trotter Pie at St John Bread and Wine. A December lunch of champions to fight off the 4pm nightfall.

Closure

Perhaps (only perhaps, mind you) this is the beginning of the end of the two-month Burgundy obsession. The symptoms are waning. I can just about appreciate other wines without comparing them to the greats of the Cote d'Or and have acknowledged that others cheeses than Epoisses are worth eating too. Especially given the frankly rude and almost frightening level of ripeness that the Epoisses in the kitchen has reached.

In search of closure, I (I should say 'we' as Jen did half the work but this is My Blog and My Obsession) made a Jambon Persille, the jelly and ham terrine that provided roughly 50% of my daily calorific needs in Burgundy (if only 20% of my actual calorific intake). It was deeply satisfying to make and much easier than it looked. As many so called complicated 'resaturant dishes' are when you have a go yourself. I urge you to try.

The recipe can be found on a bookshelf near you in Simon Hopkinson's unimpeachable Roast Chicken and Other Stories 2 (Second Helpings, it might be called). And if you don't own it click on to Amazon now, buy the book and make it for yourself. There are few better vehicles for humble white Burgundy and Dijon mustard.

Too Much

My sister and her boyfriend Greg did a sterling job for Christmas Dinner. Incidentally December 25th probably the only day of the year I have Dinner in the middle of the day. The other 364 days, I have Lunch.

For the record. I eat Lunch at lunchtime and Tea in the evening. Unless I am a) eating out or b) at someone else's house or c) rustling up something more extravagant than broccoli and pasta to eat at home with guests - when it becomes Dinner. I don't dress for Dinner but I do expect some decent wine. Supper is what other people have before bed.

Anyway, I digress.

Sister and Greg were ace. Proper turkey, the world famous Sweet Potato stuffing (the recipe is the closest we have to a family heirloom, passed down from Tesco's Christmas Magazine circa 1997 via my mother to her eldest daughter) and more types of veg that I care to recall. We all ate far too much and groaned our way back to the sofa in time honoured fashion. Quite why we force such an ernomous plateful of food on ourselves in one go is quite beyond me. But we do, all of us. A massive proportion of the 60m people in the country all overeating at exactly the same time. A quite bizarre tradition of national gluttony.

And we feel all the worse for it, compounding the problems by cramming Christmas Pud into our greedy selves as soon as we sense there is room. I didn't make it as far as cheese and Port this year. A casualty of excess and a virulent bout of manflu.

Not that I really want to change it, though. We have so few food traditions any more apart from the roast bird and pigs in blankets that it really needs encouraging not denigrating. And at the same time we need to protect and promote the other few food traditions we have: Pancake Day, Simnel Cake, Grouse in August, Oysters in September.

Missing out on the cheese and Port (even a Fonseca single Quinta 1988, dammit) is a small price to pay to keep it all going.

Stollen

The Christmas baking is in full-swing, though quite when we are going to eat it all is beyond me. No doubt, we'll end up foisting half of it on to various rellies who will smile through gritted teeth as we hand it over. Their fridges, cupboards and freezers already full to bursting without our offerings. Oh well.

The house is just stating to smell Christmassy with cinnamon, cardomom, marzipan and mixed peel baking inside a rich bread dough in the oven. I've never made Stollen before and am not sure I've even eaten it before. But it smells right for today, and feel right too; a memory of childhood Christmases for Jen.

Mr Moxon

Mr Moxon isn't normally open on Sundays but today his shop was doing a roaring festive trade. Huge white bags of pre-ordered fish lined up amongst the next-door-florist's Christmas trees on the pavement outside. Sides of smoked salmon poking out of every other one and names, numbers and £s scrawled in marker pen on the sides. Cold and misty, the whole street became a giant open-plan walk-in fridge.

My bag was heavy. A giant turbot and a bag of scallops for Christmas Eve dinner, a bronze smoked mackerel for scrambled egg breakfasts and midnight feasts and some salmon and monkfish to freeze until New Year's Eve.

The anticipation grows again.

A recipe

For the Chinese-ish pork belly from last night. Homages dues to HFW, the sublimely named Fuschia Dunlop and a restaurant in Bolzano in Northern Italy. I've nicked ideas and techniques from them all.

Take a slab of pork belly and cut in to thick strips, about 4cm across so they resemble fleshy vanilla slices. Pop in a pan, cover with water and boil for 5-10 minutes to bring out the scum. Drain, rinse pork of any scum, wipe pan clean and put everything back on the hob with some clean water. Adding some aromatics (chilli, star anise, ginger and garlic) to the water will do precious little to the flavour of the meat in the long run but make your house smell fantastic and get mouths watering. Don't leave them out.

Braise/poach/simmer for an hour and so until the meat is tender. Lift out of the stock and leave to cool before slicing across the meat to leave you with squares of pork belly, roughly 1cm thick and 4cm squared in size. Fire up a non-stick frying pan (you won't need any oil) and fry the pork squares on both sides until golden and crisp. Be careful, they will sizzle and spit. Pop them to one side on some kitchen paper.

Throw lots of finely sliced ginger, garlic and chilli into the pan (you may need to drain some of the pork fat first) and stir-fry, throw in some greens (bok choi seems appropriate, kale or cabbage would do just as well) and just as they begin to wilt return the pork to the pan. Splash in some Chinese cooking wine and soy (I used mainly Light for flavour with a bit of Dark for colour and syrupy-ness). Let the sauce reduce until dark and sticky, coating the meat and greens as it goes. A handful of sliced spring onions can go in last.

Take the pan to the table, the black sticky spicy bits on the pan are the secret to this dish. Encourage people to return the meat from their plates to the pan to wipe up all the goodness. Plain steamed rice will be just fine on the side.

Anticipation

Our first London Christmas and we are pretty organised - it helps that my sister is doing The Dinner, of course. My role is Best Supporting Brother, bringing a starter and a box of wines. We were up early this morning to shop for the starter but not early enough to avoid a queue at Mr Dove's. Twenty chilly minutes waiting outside, looking in on the array of fat chops and plump pheasants, strings of chipolatas and hunks of dark maroon beef. While other queued patiently for their turkey or goose, we were after more porcine treats and came away with more bacon than strictly necessary, a small piece of pork belly, a split trotter and some green gammon. The latter two will be turned into a Jambon Persille (the Burgundy fixation hasn't finished yet) for Christmas Day while the belly is for tonight.

It's hard to know what to cook on the 22nd and 23rd this year. It's a weekend and a holiday but you can't overdo it, not with all the feasts to come. Roast birds seem wrong, roasts full stop in fact. And anything festive or traditional feels like jumping the gun. My solution can be found in the back of the spice cupboard: star anise, ginger, chillies and the like. They will flavour the pork belly as it slowly simmers, melting the fat and the meat into one. Dark, meaty soy will add umami, colour and richness. Some bland noodles or plain rice will sit alongside with some quickly cooked bok choi.

It will be about as Christmassy as a picnic, but even with the lights on the tree and crap films on every channel, I can put off culinary Christmas for a day or two yet. Savouring the anticipation as it grows.

Mince Pies

December is busy. Two weeks since the last post and I'm struggling to remember what I've cooked in those fifteen days. A perky chicken casserole spiked with salty preserved lemon and olives, an invigorating broth made from the same chook fired up by chillies and lemongrass and topped with a steamed piece of salmon and a buttery leeky risotto is all that I can remember. The rest is the usual whirlwind of Christmas parties: mass catered food, canapes and pub food. Not very exciting. For all the foody brilliance of Christmas, early December can easily become a lean month for the flavour addict.

But today, we've started the Christmas cooking. The mincemeat (including minced meat along with the suet, fruit and booze) has spent two weeks maturing in the fridge and it was time to fill the flat with the smell of toasty pastry and sweet spice. The pastry recipe is a Dan Lepard special from yesterday's Grauniad; rich and crumbly but a horror to cope with if you are as warm blooded as I am. I am about as natural a patissier as I am a pole vaulter. But they have held together just fine, slightly oddly shaped as all home cooked treats should be.

Time now to make some brandy butter...

Take Three Ingredients

...the work Christmas Party is on Wednesday night and we are all being frogmarched round to Katie's to play a sort of Ready Steady Cook. Deeply odd. Whatever happened to just getting pissed in an awful restaurant?

Anyway, we have been told to bring three ingredients each. I am veering towards pigeon, Primula and peas.

Any ideas?

The Best Fish and Chips in London. Apparently.

Marylebone's Golden Hind chippie has a lot going for it: innumerous recommendations on the interweb as The Best Fish And Chips In London, it's in Marylebone and is BYO. There are few better places to drink fine wine than a chippie.

I tried to go two years ago but a now-ex-girlfriend of a visiting friend went AWOL and rather than a side order of mushy peas we were ordered off on a search of Tottenham Court Road. We found her back in Tooting, her homing pigeon having kicked in, and ended up eating curry, as you do in these parts.

Last night I tried to go again only to be foiled by a combination of the Central Line, torrential rain, my mobile's battery and another lost friend. I even got as far as peering in the window this time but Tim wasn't there and by this time I was 35 minutes late, soaked to the skin and unable to phone anyone. The bottle of Hunter Valley Semillon remained unopened and the fish unfried. I trudged damply towards the tube back to Tooting. And ate curry.

Tea at The River Caff

I have many favourite restuarants but two shine out, the joint firsts among equals: St John and The River Cafe. Both celebrate eating rather than cooking, and therein lies the secret of their success. They take pleasure in your pleasure rather than in the navel-gazing one-upmanship of clever-than-thou cookery. They are fantastically foam free.

Last night we ate very well at The River Cafe. You couldn't not. Not with that stunning fennel salami and fruity artichoke or that salt-crusted farinata with its mily-soft mozzarella. Not with the indecently fresh langoustines or the spaghetti with crab (note to self, add fennel seeds next time). Nor the parpadelle with the wild duck ragu or the delicate spinach and buffalo curd ravioli. Not to mention the melting soft osso buco with its half-butter-half-rice risotto or the wood roasted turbot, lifted and lightened with lemon, herbs and those tiny life-affirming Sicilian capers.

We washed it down with Vajra's 2004 Barbera, a juicy, violet-infused red that delighted in the food - even the cheese plate, a guilty, greedy end to a meal.

Home Sweet Home

We got home on Sunday night about 6, dumped the bags and darted straight down the road again to Kastoori for their Sunday Thali. It consists of a wonderful roast aubergine curry (almost smoked in fact, the flesh melted into tomatoes, onions, chilli and mustard seeds), a coarse millet chapati (rough and grey and filling), some overcooked rice mixed with mung beans (think good old fashioned peas and rice) and a hot yoghurt soup (a sort of inverse raita- uplifting, spicy and sharp rather than cooling and fresh). Real comfort food straight from a rural Indian village.

I like the fact that it takes vegetarian Gujarati food to make me feel at home.

Comic Timing

Comedy, cricket and cooking all rely on timing and in the last few days, I've got one meal spot on and the other horribly, wastefully wrong. Remember that rib of Welsh black beef? I incinerated it. How did I do it? By trusting a cookbook, some scales and some mental arithmetic rather than my own eyes and experience. The theory said it would be rare after about an hour and a half. After 55 minutes it was already too late. The fact the beef was utterly delicious made me feel even worse. Poor cow, it deserved better than that.

I redeemed myself with some whole pigeons on Monday night. A quick hot sear then eleven minutes in the oven. The meat was beautifully, evenly rare and that deep, bloody crimson colour that lifts the heart of any cook when he or she starts to carve and knows they have got it absolutely spot on.

Deepest, Wettest Wales

A happy feeling. The weather be as grey and damp as Our Boys' chances against South Africa in Cardiff this afternoon but my spirits are soaring. I have a view over the estuary, a fire, a pot of tea and some writing to do but best of all, there's a huge rib of Welsh Black Beef in the fridge and some posh Pinot Noir on the windowsill. Let the weather (and the Springboks) do their worst!

Saint Felicien: Patron Saint of Perfect Cheese

Guess where it is from? Burgundy! Oh joy of joys. Choosing it was part good luck - I'd never heard of it (or couldn't remember hearing of it, anyway) and it is hard to tell how ripe a soft cheese is when it is wrapped up - and part a result of following The Cheese Rules.

Cheese Rule no. 22: always trust a soft cheese in a terracota pot. If it needs ceramics to keep it upright and decent, it probably has the capacity to ooze, drip and goo.

It was delicious; teetering on the edge of refusing the attentions of a knife and demanding a spoon. It was rich, creamy, cheesy and complex but not hadn't reached that testing, slightly acrid stage where cheese becomes less of a meal and more of a dare. It sagged as the first crackerful was lifted out, deflated and beaten. It knew its time had come.

The Michelin Man Gets Fat on Sushi

The scores are in. London has a malnourished 50, New York an undercooked 42, Paris a better than most 98 but Tokyo is the Official Restaurant Capital of the World. It has 191 Michelin stars - deliciously one more than the other three combined.

But outside the fat egos and bellies of western foodies does anyone care? Probably not. Certainly not the patrons of most of those recently garlanded restaurants. Writing in The Guardian Jay Rayner notes many of them are tiny, sometimes seating just 5 or 6 diners, and that getting a table there is nigh on impossible without being a blood relative of the chef. I expect the news Michelin now deems them "good in their category" or "worthy of a detour" will not trouble them greatly. And nor should it. They didn't need the blessing of a French motoring guide to tell them they knew how to cook.

Our need to rate, score and classify everything can get quite tiring and when a guide or critic starts to affect the very thing it or he/she is supposed to be a detached observer of, it can get dangerous. I present Robert Parker Junior - the Baron of Bordeaux, the Barossa and Baltimore - as my first exhibit.

I spotted the term "Michelin ambitious" on a restaurant's website recently. It made my toes curl, immediately conjuring up images of over-designed plates and nasty copies of Gordon Ramsay dishes pinched from one of his books. Oh, the stink of culinary desperation. This was a restaurant trying to second guess inspectors, imitating others and not being true to itself and, more importantly, its punters.

Is cooking simple good food and keeping you customers happy no longer enough? I wish more restaurateurs would stop reaching so purposefully for the Stars. The irony being that, like Japan, if you ignore Michelin and do what you are good at you might just find the tyre man comes looking for you.

Never Order a Trilogy

I should know better. Trilogy is on my black list of words to be banned from menus. How can a trilogy of foie gras improve on either a whacking great slab of the stuff with some warm toast and cornichons on the side, or some seared liver, crisp on the outside and melting within? Answer: it can't - especially if part one of the trilogy insults both duck and diner by freezing it into Foie Gras Ice Cream. And don't get me started on the Foie Gras mousse dribbled in to a shot glass with some overly sweet carrot puree. The whole plate was an essay in pointlessness.

All of which made the main course a surprising delight. Pink pigeon breasts, plump roast garlic and thick slices of ceps is a proper Burgundian meal. It was a soberly conceived and impeccably cooked dish as was the pairing of veal sweetbreads and morels on the plate opposite me. I greedily finished both after the sweetbreads' owner gave up halfway through, no doubt saving room for the eighth portion of Epoisses of the week.

Burgundy was full of good food. My notebook is crammed with hastily scribbled notes about Oeufs en Meurette, Jambon Persille, Ox Cheek, Poulet de Bresse, Cote de Beouf, Dauphinoise spuds, Pigeon, Ceps and, bien sure, Epoisses. But eating this way, twice a day, is excessive. A week is enough, by Friday I was dreaming about broccoli. Frequently the only greenery was a handful of lamb's lettuce wilting under the weight of some pan seared gizzards. Back in London, the soup pot will see some action this week. A coarse minestrone put me back together yesterday and a weak miso broth awaits tonight.

I've returned with some good addresses though, including Ma Cuisine in Beaune and L'Auberge du Vieux Vigneron in Corpeau near Chassagne (anywhere patronised by Anne-Claude Leflaive has to be good). Check them out if you are in the area - and don't worry there won't be a trilogy in sight.

"I don't do bones, I'm not a dog."

Ben Collins is missing out. He left a perfectly good bone from a juicy cote de veau - full of meat - left ungnawed. His canine excuse clearly fell on deaf ears, as I shredding a confited pigeon wing with my teeth at the time. But then I've always thoughts dogs had some of the best ideas.

Ma Cuisine in Beaune was on fire tonight. The Jambon Persille had really good jelly (herby, garlicky and firm) while the pigeon was gamey and rich. The Cote de Veau eaters purred too, bone or no bone. And finally, the Epoisses - not compulsory, but bloody good.

The Rules in Burgundy

I'm in Burgundy for a week tasting wines. Hard life, I know. But there are a few golden rules to remember food-wise.

1. Snails are not an acceptable mid morning snack
2. Fermented grape juice doesn't count as one of your five a day
3. Epoisses is not compulsory at every meal

My primary aim for this week is to find the perfect Jambon Persille - that's a ham hock terrine set in some seriously parsley'd up jelly for those who have never come across it. It's a perfect vehicle for dijon mustard and half-decent white Burgundy. I'll keep you posted with how I get on.

Toku Time

Clothes shopping in central London is my idea of hell. The presence of an affordable, unpretentious Japanese restaurant makes it all the more bearable. The thought of some barely marinated mackerel smeared with nose tingled wasabi will get me through a lot of shops with clothes that cater for skinny boys and not lovers of tete de veau.

Today at Toku we had some beautifully cooked tempura vegetables - even the baby corn was worth eating - and a plate of spanking fresh sushi washed down with a can of Sapporo lager. Walking back on to Piccadilly we found that we had lost our London edge. We'd slowed our pace, stopped getting frustrated by meandering tourists and found fewer being uttered under our breaths as we got cut up by inconsiderate people dragging wheelie bags behind them. With good food inside, London is less of a battle.

Rioja Grande

Top 5 food related things from the a weekend in Northern Spain:

1. A sidestreet bar in Bilbao serving perfect pata negra ham, dinky fillet steak pintxos and La Rioja Alta Gran Reserva 904 1995. Awesome. We knocked off several raciones of ham, drank half a dozen brilliant bottles of red, kept the bar staff back an hour with our enthusiasm and walked out for 20 euros a head. Ridiculous.

2. Tortilla. The best thing to drink before, during and after a night on the Vino Tinto in Logrono. Eggs, potatoes and onions never tasted so good.

3. Creamed rice and goose liver at Dinastia Vivanco's restaurant in Briones. It didn't reach the heights of the foie gras risotto at Cambol Zero in July but it was still the best thing on the menu. Disgustingly rich.

4. The rain in Spain falls mainly in San Sebastian. The antidote to a very wet Monday morning in SS? A coarse fish broth in a rustic pintxos bar. A thin, brown, fishy gruel full of the flavour of the sea. Delicious.

5. Jen's chicken soup spiced with the Thai paste from the fridge and full of green noodles and even greener pak choi. If the fish soup warmed the cockles in San Sebastian this washed away the Stansted experience and told me I was home.

Soda Bread

An idea that has been playing on my mind for a while. I’ve been looking for an easy midweek loaf, something that can be knocked up quickly after work when we’ve run out of sourdough but still need to eat tomorrow morning. Two recipes have caught my eye - both for their serving suggestions. One advises Guinness and oysters. The other butter and Marmite. Great breakfasts both.

Two hours after coming through the door, the bread is mixed, baked and cool enough to slice. It tastes nutty and wholesome. Not dense, but not light either; a substantial, winter loaf. But Today is a school day, the oysters will have to wait for a lazy weekend a trip to Borough to see Mr Hayward. The only black stuff on the table was Marmite - though it was the new fangled Guinness variety.

Making Do

Wiser cooks than I have mused that most of the best dishes use only three or four ingredients. Simplicity rules. A dish of fried sardines and the day before’s ratatouille cooked in the South of France and gobbled down with cold rose is Exhibit A. I don’t need to tell you the success lay in shimmering fresh fish and vegetables that had grown juicy in the heat of the sun.

Last night was an attempt to relive the summer. We put the heating on for the first time since last winter and put a dish of fish and tomatoes in the oven. Hardly Provence but heartwarming all the same.

It’s an easy dish. Waxy potatoes sliced thin and baked until they threaten to turn golden. Cherry toms halved and thrown over the top, the dish returning to the oven until the skins are shrivelled and the sugars sweetened. Some herbs - thyme and bay - have gone in to, along with a few slivers of garlic and a slug from the good olive oil bottle. Finally, it’s the fish. Yesterday bream, on another day it might be a couple of red mullets. When all is cooked some rocket and basil complete the tricolore. The result is a dish of artificially created sunshine. The epicure’s tanning lamp.

A fantastic food and wine match

A lot of hot air is spoken about food and wine matching by winos and foodies - and I include myself in the guilty parties - and, in my saner moments, I am a firm believer in the "drink what you like school of thought". I remember watching my friend Jon devour Dover Sole with a huge Chilean Merlot, just because he loved both fish and wine. Who am I to tell him he is wrong?

But occasionally, you stumble across something genuinely brilliant, where the wine becomes an extra flavour, an integral part of the dish. I say stumbled, in this case I salute the chef/sommelier team at Mu (pronounced Mju) who matched Boudin Blanc with Celeriac Puree & Muscat Grapes with Alois Lageder's wonderful Lagrein Rosato 2006 at a recent wine dinner. The rich, soft boudin and fruity grapes were lifted by the soft, bitter-edged fruit of the wine with the acidity cutting through the fat. The wine benefitted from this gastronomic symbiosis too - becoming slightly more serious and focussed, like it it had thrown off the shackles of being a frivolous pink and joined the proper wines at the big table.

Pig's Head & Rabbit

A treat. Arbutus with Ayo was an alliterative joy. For those of you who have been living on Mars for the last eighteen months, Arbutus is an award winning London restaurant that shocked many by winning a Michein star in its first year despite its unpretentious style and food. And for those of you who have never met him, Ayo is the best dressed HR professional ever to pour over the Sunday Times best companies list.

The food was very good. I knew what I was eating before I got there. As long as they were on the menu - and they usually are - it would be Pigs Head followed by Rabbit. The Pigs Head arrives as a deep oblong block. A perfectly ordered geometric shape containing a messy mosaic of porky goodness. The head is slow cooked then picked, shaped and finally, roasted. The crisp, brown outer hiding melting fat and sweet, juicy meat. Porcine heaven. If you have never eaten Pig's Head - or just the cheek, or Ox cheek, or tete de veau - then you must.

The rabbit dish is a modern London classic. The slightly roasted saddle comes stuffed with the kidney, with a 'shepherds pie' made from slow cooked shoulder served in an individual casserole on the side. The hint of offal adding richness and depth to the soft, subtle white meat of the saddle. The side dish pie adding an all important degree of fun as well as a more rabbity element to the dish. It really is very good.

We drank exceptionally well too - Paillard NPU 1990, Giaconda Roussanne 2004 and Ornelleia 1999. All utterly delicious - thank you, Ayo - dining out with such fine wines is a rare exception to the norm.

On this occasion Arbutus was excellent, but it is not perfect. It has won many of its plaudits for the way it serves its wine. All (or nearly all) are available by the glass, carafe or bottle. It is a great idea. When we first visited we ran through half the list between four of us, tasting 8 or 9 250ml carafes over the evening. But there is little point having such innovative wine service, if the wines themselves do not match up. The pricey gems from the top of the list we drank on Thursday apart, too much of the list is just boring. The owners may know how to sell wine. They need to learn how to buy it.

Daily Bread

I wanted to call this blog Daily Bread but the name had gone. Hopefully to a devotee of Dan Lepard rather than any higher powers. One of the world's greatest pleasures is baking bread. It gives a warm, false aura of self-sufficiency, even in a South London flat where the nearest edible animal is probably at Vauxhall City Farm. Our sourdough starter, Beast, is the third member of the family. It needs to be fed and nurtured. Just as it feeds and nurtures us.

Sunday's loaf was our first with spelt. Coarser but lighter than the usual rye. it has produced a wonderful bouncy, open loaf with a sweet, nuttiness to balance the inherent sourness. Cut thick and covered in Marmite, it made a frugal but delicious supper. Two days on and it is approaching the watershed when it becomes slightly too stale to eat as it is, demanding a burst in the toaster before the thick layers of butter and marmite are spread on. No matter, it makes world class toast and by Thursday, it will be gone.

By the weekend, there will be a new loaf: warmer, fresher and more satisfying than any from a bakery.

Happy Birthday, Ben

After a bland week where work dominated and food became a rushed bowl of pasta or something grabbed on the run, a weekend blow out. It was the best sort of Saturday lunch: good friends round the table and a string of courses. Starting with Champagne and oysters outside Southwark Cathedral at Borough and finishing with Birthday cake washed down with Moscato d'Asti.

In between came simply grilled English courgettes and homemade grissini, then fluffy ravioli filled with poached garlic and piled up with sage, ceps and winter chanterelles. A huge piece of tuna was seared briefly in a fiercely hot pan. A salt and pepper crust hiding raw, ruby flesh, sliced thick, like roast beef, at the table - a salad of baby fennel, preserved lemon and spanked pomegranate on the side.

Bottles of Campanian Fiano and Kiwi Pinot came and went and the cheese board was soon nothing more crumbs and a hard rind of pecorino.

7 friends, 6 courses and 11 bottles of wine to celebrate 30 years of Ben. Happy Birthday, mate.

A Holy Trinity

Pork, mustard and wine. In this case, it is Toulouse sausages, dijon stirred through some puy lentils with plenty of parsley and garlic and a fresh, peppery bottle of Syrah from the Northern Rhone. Jamet's Cotes du Rhone 2005 from declassified Cote Rotie, since you ask. A leftover bottle from the wedding.

But it could just as easily have been a glazed ham, some Colmans English (from powder) and a glass of a Macon Villages. Pork, mustard and wine. A restorative meal that can comfort and invigorate at the same time. A launch into the weekend.

Take Away

A Saturday night tv dinner. Steve McQueen as Lt Bullit on the screen and food from the wonderful Gujarati/East African restaurant Kastoori on the plate. The Thankis have been cooking their fabulous slightly hybrid food in Tooting for longer than I have been alive, ever since one Idi Amin kicked them out of Uganda.

Ordering is easy. Whenever we eat in at the restaurant, it's thali time. When we take out, it's as easy as asking for Vegetable Curry of the Day and Beans Curry of the Day. In a world of infinite choices, it is refreshing not to have to make a decision. There is also something exciting about eating whatever Chef is enthused about cooking that that day. Yesterday it was plump baby aubergines that had caught his eye. They burst open to meld creamy flesh with the spicy tomato sauce they had been cooked in. Delicious. The 'beans' were firm, nutty lentils that had retained the shape of each pulse, the bite of which gave a wonderful textural counterpoint to the slop of the aubergine. Fabulous, real food. Thank you, Mr Thanki.

Almost doesn't count

Just occasionally you eat a dish in a restaurant that is so good that it ruins everything. It used to be something you cooked at home, or would order elsewhere, but not any more. You've seen how good it can be and you know nothing else will suffice. Trying to recreate is an exercise in futility and disappointment.

So it was last night. We had perfectly fine ribeye steak, cooked just as rare as I like it but good as it was it just didn't match up to the what I ate at Hawksmoor back in June. Up until that meal, I was always a bit ambivalent about steak but now I am the worst sort of convert; evangelical, puritanical and obsessive. Now I love steak - as long as it is the Ginger Pig's 28 day Longhorn beef with Heston-inspired thrice cooked chips and textbook bearnaise.

Last night's was almost as good but, now, almost doesn't count.

A Fragrant Lamb Stew

Sunday afternoons are perfect for playing Mah Jong and drinking wine. For the record, the wine should be red and not too complicated. Fruit and spice are helpful, serious tannins are not. I missed some important tiles a few weeks back whilst I decided whether the tannins on an '02 claret would outlast the fruit. Cheap old vine Spanish Garnacha is about perfect.

Unfortunately, just as it takes two to tango, it takes four to go in search of Dragonflies and Windy Chows, and our regular partners are currently devouring tagines in Fez. So I decided to copy them. If nothing else, it would be an excuse to bump and grind some spices. The closest to r and b that I get. The result was a lamb stew fragrant with cumin and coriander, warmed by a slick of harissa and sweetened with some dried apricots which dissolved into a rich gravy. Black olives providing a darker bass note. Bland, fluffy couscous was all that was needed on the side.

And the leftovers cheered me up at my desk today. Spices and stewed meat seemed right for a clear, sunny day with a bite of winter in the wind. Autumnal food.

A Brill Supper

Fish and chips for a Friday night. Well, sort of. A big, shiny brill baked with thyme, lemon and butter and some roasted wedges of spud alongside. The kind of fish and chips that takes very little effort when you lack either a deep fat fryer or the concentration to be trusted with hot oil on the hob.

The brill from Mr Moxon's was a superb fish, almost as good as a turbot. Which, as Jane Grigson writes in her seminal Fish Book, is the curse of the brill; always being compared to one of the sea's most aristocratic meals. But such a comparison is really unfair. We should forget the T-fish and let brill be as brilliant as it can be. Last night's was soft, meaty and flavourful with big, juicy flakes of flesh and herby buttery juices. A bubbles of a bottle of Bruno Paillard's Rose Champagne made a happy partner as we watched Bruno's countrymen throw away the World Cup on the telly.

Monday's Pulse

A Monday night dhal: sloopy mung beans cooked with sticky onions and some lazy shakes from the spice rack. A few potatoes from the bottom of the veg box add texture to the melted pulses while a dried chilli gives a flash of red to the bland yellow-beige. Wonderfully inauthentic but fabulously forgiving, it sustains and comforts, mopped up with a coarse homemade chapati.
Flawed but perfect.

A Stilton by any other name

A new find mooching about Borough Market yesterday, a blue cheese that looked like Stilton, smelled like Stilton and tasted like bloody good Stilton. Even the name sounded suspicously like Stilton. But it wasn't Stilton, it was Stichelton. Confused? I was.

A little research was required.

Like Stilton, Stichelton is a mature blue veined cow's milk cheese from Nottinghamshire, and is the brainchild of Joe Schneider and Randolph Hodgson. Now Mr H is the man behind Neal's Yard Dairy and a man who knows his curds from his whey - so it should be no suprise this is a fine cheese. But why the funny name? Why isn't this just another good old fashioned English Stilton?

The answer is GOFE Stilton has to be made from pasteurised milk. All well and good but a state of affairs that left a big unanswered question. How good would unpasteurised Stilton be? Here's where Joe and Randolph come in - because that is exactly what Stichelton is, an unpasteurised Stilton.

And, boy, it is good. Deceptively creamy and mild up front, the guts and tang creeping up on you as you eat it. A delicious, wonderfully balanced blue. Even the name isn't the awful piece of marketing I originally feared, but an old English name for the village of Stilton.

Tasted blind, I have every faith that I would not be able to tell the difference between it and Cropwell Bishop's finest, but who cares? It tasted superb, especially washed down with a bottle of Reinhold Haart's Piesporter Domherr Riesling Spatelese 2005.

A fine end to a Saturday, even if I was too tired to stay up and see the Hammers on Match of the Day.